Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [336]
His words came like a sudden explosion: “He was the only man—with one exception—to whom I could have given my life!”
“Who is the exception?”
“The man to whom I have.”
“What do you mean?”
He shook his head, as if he had said more than he intended, and did not answer.
“What did you do to Rearden?”
“I’ll tell you some time. Not now.”
“Is that what you always do to those who ... mean a great deal to you?”
He looked at her with a smile that had the luminous sincerity of innocence and pain. “You know,” he said gently, “I could say that that is what they always do to me.” He added, “But I won’t. The actions—and the knowledge—were mine.”
He stood up. “Shall we go? I’ll take you home.”
She rose and he held her coat for her; it was a wide, loose garment, and his hands guided it to enfold her body. She felt his arm remain about her shoulders a moment longer than he intended her to notice.
She glanced back at him. But he was standing oddly still, staring intently down at the table. In rising, they had brushed aside the mats of paper lace and she saw an inscription cut into the plastic of the table top. Attempts had been made to erase it, but the inscription remained, as the graven voice of some unknown drunk’s despair: “Who is John Galt?”
With a brusque movement of anger, she flicked the mat back to cover the words. He chuckled.
“I can answer it,” he said. “I can tell you who is John Galt.”
“Really? Everybody seems to know him, but they never tell the same story twice.”
“They’re all true, though—all the stories you’ve heard about him.”
“Well, what’s yours? Who is he?”
“John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains and he withdrew his fire—until the day when men withdraw their vultures.”
The band of crossties swept in wide curves around granite corners, clinging to the mountainsides of Colorado. Dagny walked down the ties, keeping her hands in her coat pockets, and her eyes on the meaningless distance ahead; only the familiar movement of straining her steps to the spacing of the ties gave her the physical sense of an action pertaining to a railroad.
A gray cotton, which was neither quite fog nor clouds, hung in sloppy wads between sky and mountains, making the sky look like an old mattress spilling its stuffing down the sides of the peaks. A crusted snow covered the ground, belonging neither to winter nor to spring. A net of moisture hung in the air, and she felt an icy pin-prick on her face once in a while, which was neither a raindrop nor a snowflake. The weather seemed afraid to take a stand and clung noncommittally to some sort of road’s middle; Board of Directors’ weather, she thought. The light seemed drained and she could not tell whether this was the afternoon or the evening of March 31. But she was very certain that it was March 31; that was a certainty not to be escaped.
She had come to Colorado with Hank Rearden, to buy whatever machinery could still be found in the closed factories. It had been like a hurried search through the sinking hulk of a great ship before it was to vanish out of reach. They could have given the task to employees, but they had come, both prompted by the same unconfessed motive: they could not resist the desire to attend the run of the last train, as one cannot resist the desire to give a last salute by attending a funeral, even while knowing that it is only an act of self-torture.
They had been buying machinery from doubtful owners in sales of dubious legality, since nobody could tell who had the right to dispose of the great, dead properties, and nobody would come to challenge the transactions. They had bought everything that could be moved from the gutted plant of Nielsen Motors. Ted Nielsen had quit and vanished, a week after the announcement that the Line was to be closed.
She had felt like a scavenger, but the activity of the